Pulse of the economy: Centre to release several statistical findings in next few months

A number of significant reports on economic data are likely to be released in the next few months that are expected to give a clearer picture on how the economy has been performing. The annual Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2023-24 as well as the Annual Survey on Industries (ASI) 2022-23 are scheduled to be released in September.  

The Ministry of Statistics And Programme Implementation will also release the factsheets for the Annual Survey on Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) for 2023-24 and the Household Consumer Expenditure Survey (HCES) 2023-24 in December. The detailed reports for these two surveys will be released in the following month in January 2025.

The detailed report on the time use survey is expected to be released by the end of March 2025.

These reports will provide rich data on how the economy has been shaping up in recent years in terms of growth and investments by formal and informal sector enterprises and businesses, job creation as well as spending by households on various products. Some of them also provide inputs for other statistical exercises including the updating of the consumer price index basket as well as national accounts statistics. The data also guides the government in better targeting of schemes or coming up with new initiatives.

The annual PLFS report, which is the official statistics on job creation, will give a comprehensive picture on employment and unemployment trends across the country last fiscal. As per the last annual PLFS report, the unemployment rate dipped to 3.2% in 2022-23 from a high of 6% in 2017-18.

The Annual Survey on Industries provides complete data on the number of industries in the country as well as insights into the dynamics of change in the composition, growth and structure of various manufacturing industries in terms of output, value-added, employment, capital formation and a host of other parameters. They also provide inputs for the National Accounts Statistics.

The ministry has also recently released the ASUSE reports for 2021-22 and 2022-23 that showed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on informal sector enterprises or the micro, small and medium enterprises. The findings of the HCES survey for 2022-23 was also released recently and the second report is awaited. The reports of the two rounds of surveys will be used for updating the CPI basket.

The time use survey also provides important data on how men and women use their time for different activities and their contribution to the economy in terms of paid and unpaid work.  It also provides information on the time spent in unpaid caregiving activities, unpaid volunteer work, unpaid domestic service producing activities of the household members.